Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Banksy

There are four basic human needs; food, sleep, sex and revenge.


Let's put them in the right order.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

This might even be true.

Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases.

Just not on my stuff.

Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else.

A tad cynical, he suspected.

People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.

You know, on average.

All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?

And then the equivalent of that here.
promethean75
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by promethean75 »

"The greatest secret of monarchic rule...is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting." - B. Spinz

Edit: including alternate translation

"The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation."
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Emily St. John Mandel

So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it.


Hell, that's worse than a whimper.

It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.

Dasein in a nutshell as it were.

That's the thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place.

If only all the way to the grave.

But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: “Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking".

Then what, of course.

The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?

Well, among other things, a good start.

“It seems like it’s been fairly well contained,” but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all?

Either way, it's all a hoax, right?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Edward Abbey

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.


You know, if that's, say, an actual option.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

In theory, for example.

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

In theory, for example.

Freedom begins between the ears.

On the other hand, it can end between them too.

I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.

Right, and who would dispute what that entails.

If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.

Their girlfriends too.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Joe Abercrombie

That’s what war does. Strips people and places of their identities and turns them into enemies in a line, positions to be taken, resources to be foraged. Anonymous things that can be carelessly crushed, and stolen, and burned without guilt.


Even boasted about.

Do you know what's worse than a villain? A villain who thinks he's a hero. A man like that, there's nothing he won't do and he'll always find himself an excuse.

Any villians here?

War is no place for good men.

And, as often as not, peace either.

Enough to make a man believe in God, said Temple. And that He’s somewhere else.

Far, far, far away, for example.

You are a gentleman, sir, muttered Cosca.
I am a murderer.
I see no reason why a man cannot be both . . .


Is there a reason?

Honor, eh? What the hell is that anyway? Every man thinks it's something different. You can't drink it. You can't fuck it. The more of it you have the less good it does you, and if you've got none at all you don't miss it. He shook his head. But some men think it's the best thing in the world.

Next up: Dishonor.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Thomas Ligotti

Time will take care of everyone until there are none of us to take care of.


Pick one:
1] bleak
2] heartening


Yet how much slack do you give to what you believe is a lie, even a lie that holds steady the social order and braces up everything you have become accustomed to your most cherished image of yourself, your country, your loved ones, and the value you place on your work, your hobbies, your possessions, your "way of life"? How much slack do you give to what you believe to be a lie before you say you have had it with lies, before you forsake everything to live with what you really think and feel about the way things are? How much slack? Answer: all the slack in the world.

Some of course more than others.

The conclusions to which temperament lead an individual, whether or not they are conclusions refractory to those of world society, are simply not subject to analysis.

Besides, some insist, we're born with it.

This practice of his allowed him to express a mode of personal identity, however trivial and illusory, as if such a thing could be achieved merely by adorning oneself with a particular item of apparel or even by displaying particular character traits such as a reserved manner or a high degree of intelligence, all and any of which qualities were shared by millions and millions of persons past and present and would continue to be exhibited by millions and millions of persons in the future, making the effort to perpetrate a distinctive sense of an identity apart from other persons or creatures, or even inanimate objects, no more than a ludicrous charade.

Let's exchange charades.

And so the denunciations of critics who say the pessimist should kill himself or be decried as a hypocrite make every kind of sense in a world of card-carrying or crypto optimists. Once this is understood, the pessimist can spare himself from suffering more than he need at the hands of “normal people,” a confederation of upstanding creatures who in concert keep the conspiracy going.

Got a few of them here, don't we?

Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and everything else that puts both average and above-average citizens in the limelight, pessimists are sideliners in both history and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, they could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause.

On the other hand, they might become sociopaths.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Bart D. Ehrman

What we think of as the twenty-seven books of “the” New Testament emerged out of these conflicts, and it was the side that won the debates over what to believe that decided which books were to be included in the canon of scripture.


Mere mortals debating God's word. How weird is that?

In some parts of the church, the Apocalypse of John (the book of Revelation) was flat out rejected as containing false teaching, whereas the Apocalypse of Peter, which eventually did not make it in, was accepted. There were some Christians who accepted the Gospel of Peter and some who rejected the Gospel of John.

Again, weird stuff given it's the word of God.

Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems.

Tell that to the true believers here.

God was the ultimate source of all that was divine. But there were lower divinities as well.

For example, her.

I wonder if the fact that I left the faith is somehow seen as threatening, at least among people who have a gnawing suspicion.

Anyone have that gnawing suspicion here?

One of the ironies of modern religion is that the absolute commitment to truth in some forms of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity and the concomitant view that truth is objective and can be verified by any impartial observer have led many faithful souls to follow the truth wherever it leads—and where it leads is often away from evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity.

Discuss.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Philosophy Tweets

"If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth". Carl Sagan


Misattributed to Sagan some insist. Still, point taken right?

"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." David Hume

About, for example, the existence of God.

"People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau


Not here, thank goodness.

“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” G. W. F. Hegel

Wow, who would have thought that?

“To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.” G. W. F. Hegel

How about this: a context.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history." G. W. F. Hegel

So, among other things, don't forget to vote!
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Brian Eno

Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.


Right, like it can never, ever be both.

If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.

Well, not counting people perhaps.

What makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

Hard to get more subjective than that.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

Or not misleading at all. Like here: https://youtu.be/Kueq3dYyBLE

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.

How slightly?

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.

You tell me.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Steven Pinker

The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”


How about if we apply that here! Stop fooling ourselves.

Optimism is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge.

On the other hand, that's where I come in.

Slavery and other forms of bondage, of course, have not been obliterated from the face of the earth. As a result of recent publicity about the trafficking of people for labor and prostitution, one sometimes hears the statistically illiterate and morally obtuse claim that nothing has changed since the 18th century, as if there were no difference between a clandestine practice in a few parts of the world and an authorized practice everywhere in the world.

True. On the other hand, the wage slaves generated by capitalism are still authorized pretty much everywhere in the world.

“The two deepest questions about the mind are “What makes intelligence possible?” and “What makes consciousness possible?”

The free will folks have an answer for that, of course: "somehow", it just happened.

To make decisions “rationally,” by some set of rules, means to base the decisions on some grounds of truth.

My best guess: Yours.

Ending extreme poverty for all people everywhere! May I live to see the day. Not even Jesus was that optimistic: he told a supplicant, “The poor you will always have with you.”

Come on, did Jesus really say that?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Yuval Noah Harari

More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.


You tell me.

Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture.

For example, the parts where I come in.

When you inflict suffering on yourself in the name of some story, it gives you a choice: 'Either the story is true, or I am a gullible fool.' When you inflict suffering on others, you are also given a choice: 'Either the story is true, or I am a cruel villain.' And just as we don't want to admit we are fools, we also don't want to admit we are villains, so we prefer to believe that the story is true.

Finally, the "human condition" is pinned down.

Whereas the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to theist religions, the Scientific Revolution gave birth to humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods.

On the other hand, tell that to her.

Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world?

Well, there are, after all, more of us.

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’.

Discuss.
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Dontaskme
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Dontaskme »

Everything Turns To Shit

Image
Walker
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Walker »

Res Ipsa Loquitur
The degree of philosophical sophistication is self-evident in each transmission, and each previous transmission.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Emile M. Cioran

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.


Nope, not yet. Well, not for me anyway.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

Of others, of course.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

If you're doing it right.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

You're up, Olivia.

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

Naturally, you get this or you don't.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Of course, this too shall pass.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Banksy

Once upon a time there was a bear and a bee who lived in a wood and were the best of friends. All summer long the bee collected nectar from morning to night while the bear lay on his back basking in the long grass. When winter came the bear realised he had nothing to eat and thought to himself 'I hope that busy little bee will share some of his honey with me.' But the bee was nowhere to be found - he had died of a stress induced coronary disease.


Lesson learned?

The human race is the most stupid and unfair kind of race. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water.
Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side.
It's not surprising a lot of people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk and shout abuse.


Sure, that works for most of us.

People either love me or they hate me, or they don't really care.

Wow, what if that's true for all of us?

A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.

And not just a brick wall.

A recent survey or North American males found 42% were overweight, 34% were critically obese and 8% ate the survey.

Sounds about right.

Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.

Or the equivalent of that here.
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